Talk to Me. Avoid language barriers by using a real-time speech-to-speech translator.

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Translate language speech to text and text to speech phrases with many different language options
• Email and SMS text message the translations
• Great for traveling
• More language options in text to speech mode

Cons

• Voice translation only works from English to other languages and not in reverse, however you can toggle text to speech mode to write for example Spanish to Italian
• Not 100% accurate but what automated translation service is?!?

Features:

Talk to Me Android App is a speech language translation app for many languages, which also supports text to speech. Send your translations to friends via SMS text message or email the audio file. The speech detection experience has been much better than Google's voice to text experience.

Voice Languages Supported (there are many more language options in text to speech mode):

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)

Usefulness:

Talk to Me Android App is very useful to those trying to learn another language or travel.

Ease of Use:

Simply tap the big green button and speak a short phrase into the phone, a few seconds later it will translate in the language and dialect of the translation language chosen.

Frequently Used:

User dependent, maybe sparingly or casual use.

Interface:

Nothing fancy but very intuitive.

Google's two new announcements: integrating a Twitter-like service into Gmail and a goal of a real-time speech translation service shows what direction they're taking the company: Into the space between you and every other human being on the planet.

To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.

Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.

Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...

Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?

Google Docs: For longer documents.

Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.

Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.

Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.

Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.

But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

User: Taminania
Location: Norway
Occupation: Psychologist

These sound like the character sketch for the lead in a science fiction piece about some dystopian future. Maybe a future ruled through a bot-mediated reality? Sorry, just had to touch on yesterday's post about that.

The information above is true in fact. She is a social psychologist in Oslo, Norway that goes by the user name Taminania on Google Reader. And she shares about 20 blog posts on average from her subscription list daily. I have never met or spoken with Taminania but she is a rock star in my world. A smart rock star.

She isn't the leader of a rogue group fighting for survival in the aforementioned dystopian world. She is a passionate psychologist that seeks out high quality content online in her field then shares it online. In this sharing process the door opens wide to accept her recommendations, nearly tacit, that allow those that come across her Google Reader shared feed enlightened.

In every example of the site that I have built to capture and continue filtering her shared feed, and that of about 59 others, I talk about her shares. By filtering the master feed that Taminania creates through daily user activity I am able to glean what I find most valuable and let the rest flow on by.

Example:

I have created a group called Taminania Science. Where I filter down the entire content database to shares from Tamihania, from any publisher and with the keywords augmented, brain, reality, science, research.

Which currently yields the following results:

1. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
2. Foreign subtitles improve speech perception
3. Why Do We Dream?
4. Are You Treating Your Computer Better Than You Treat Yourself?
5. New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not
6. Geoffrey Cohen on Identity, Belief, and Bias
7. Bacteria in Gut Linked to Obesity; Western Diet a Factor

Compare this list her current (as of this moment) full Google Reader shared feed:

1. Drop of water
2. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
3. Google *Chrome OS* To Launch Within A Week
4. Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.
5. How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog
6. A New TV Guide for Internet Television
7. The Introvert's Guide to People

Of all the links in the first list above I am not subscribed to a single of the publishers. I don't need to be to get the value of their content. However, I do need a guide like Taminania that has an understanding the topics and the drive to sort the quality content from these publishers. The other thing I need is the software to make it happen. In this case I built it for myself and would love to publicly release it. But in the current version it doesn't scale very well and has a tendency to crash my server. Who can make this happen for everyone?

The answer is simple Google. What I have created are features and an automated advanced search that pulls from a pool of data. My pool is currently 43k items. Google's slightly larger. By a factor of 10k or more I am sure.

What I am able to learn from Taminania's shares in what is clearly not a dystopian reality comes to me from as close to osmosis as a human can get when it comes to information. In this version of the story we are all learners and we are all teachers. The only problem is that we don't have the tools we need to teach.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Google Reader and The Osmotic Learner is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Fifteen years ago I listened to James Burke at a symposium deliver a speech titled, Axe Makers of the 21st Century. It was the precursor to his writing of The Axemaker's Gift. A book that dealt with the problem that Burke was working through in his head before the internet exploded.

Axe Makers was a syllogistic study of mankind's ability to restructure society based on how the internet age would create a diaspora of talented workers. These workers in turn would be able to lead a nomadic lifestyle based on their connectivity to the internet as information workers. At this time, part of his hypothesis was that these workers would then raise the standard of living for local inhabitants.

Some components of Burke's look into the future have come true. A connected information worker can now perform their duties from anywhere they choose as long as their employer has signed off on it. Another was his correct assumption that the ubiquity of near real-time information would change global culture.

His book, The Axmaker's Gift, was an attempt to reconcile this new culture shift with cultures of the past. Burke was concerned that technology was and would strip away our humanity. That our future needed to have a moderated technological lust passion interest. In the book he advocates for the simplicity of life and a continued movement toward small communities but not through technology.

What really got me going down this path today thinking about James Burke was my experience at another small conference here in New York. As an information worker in one of America's largest cities, I find myself more connected to a community of like people than ever before.

For the last three years I was one of the diaspora working from remotely from home for businesses that at their closest proximity to me were 900 miles away. An opportunity that Burke described in detail. But in this space I was isolated. I had a few friends that could identify with my work life and worked in similar ways. However, most of the people that I was in contact with on a daily basis I couldn't connect with. We existed in two separate realities.

What Burke didn't account for was this loss of community due to the lack of commonality in the experience that nomadic workers have with the locals they take up residence with. In New York I am able to continually find common experiences with other people, workers that have similar experiences to mine.

The proximity of information workers even in this large city is due to the multitude of businesses that need our services. Many of them in media and others in financial or advertising benefit from the central location of talent. What makes this talent even more valuable is its ability to connect to one another and flow through these businesses to keep culture and ideas fresh.

The ability to capitalize on common experience, talent and proximity is what has made certain locations on our planet the centers for varying industries. Information workers, like Burke described, should be considered skilled tradespeople that for the better should be concentrated into spaces so that they can produce their best work.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Proximity: The Power of Space is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith

The web is a wonderful place. It's got something for everyone. And it has become increasingly social due to new tools that connect our online and offline lives. Think Facebook and Twitter's abilities to move messages between the web and mobile phones.

With this connectivity there is a massive amount of information being created that allows us to find others interested in the same topics. Simply by using these services your own ideas, passions and causes spill out in the public eye.

The intersection of your media, by sharing, allows you connect to more people. That's a given, right? But it also allows you to be a teacher.

Yes, it's 99% Noise

We all know that most of what is shared online, especially via social networks is crap. It is a bunch of noise about going, doing and just did. Inside of this insidious sharing that we do, however, are some amazing insights, lessons and knowledge that wouldn't be captured without the services and electronic connectivity.

In a given day, our experiences lead us to create messages, content, that formerly would have been lost in the ether. Or, it would have been crammed away in some recess our minds and assimilated into our behavior, speech or thought processes.

Yes, 1% is Good

But that 1% that you didn't tuck away or forget to deliver ad nauseam can become the one message that helps those connected with you more than you expected or could have known the impact of.

This percentage claim I would also stake to academia. Name more than one time that you sat in a classroom and didn't have to filter out instructor bias, wheezing, indecipherable accent, bad hair, uncomfortable seat or delightfully appealing classmate. Distractions exist everywhere and online they are amplified, but no different than what one faces in a classroom.

By participating online, you are leading (up to you what direction that is) and by association you are teaching throughout the day. Professors and instructional designers call this associative learning.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Post from: TechStartups.com

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Update: The CNN iPhone App is now in the app store. Download it here [iTunes link].
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A little over a month ago, we reviewed the NPR News iPhone App. We raved about its radio integration and personalization options, so much that we definitively declared that NPR's iPhone app blows other news apps out of the water.

We may have spoken too soon, because that declaration was before the CNN iPhone App.

The CNN iPhone App, which is now live in the app store [iTunes link], is nothing short of impressive. It combines breaking news with customization, the ability to save stories, streaming video whenever breaking news is in progress, and most intriguing of all, citizen journalism.

CNN's iPhone App: It's Impressive

The CNN iPhone app is divided into four key (but very different) components, combining for one seamless app experience. Here's what you can expect if you download the $1.99 app:

Headlines: It's the core of any news app being able to read breaking news. You can sift through news by recency and by category (crime, politics, health, etc). And since it's CNN, you can also share stories via Facebook Connect, Twitter, SMS, and email.

Oh, one more cool thing about headlines: if you turn your iPhone on the side, you can view stories like you can your iPod album covers. Flick through images to find the story that interests you. It's a uniquely visual way to consume news.

My CNN: The app is chock-full of personalization options. Our favorite is the ability to save stories you want to read later. You don't even need a connection to read saved stories, so you pick out the news you want and read it on the plane without a problem.

Another nifty feature: you can follow topics or stories that interest you and get alerts when there are updates to that story.

Video: Yeah, this app gets even better. It is CNN we're talking about, so you'd hope there would be some video. You can watch on-demand clips related to breaking news. However, we're huge fans of the live streaming video integration. Anytime there's a breaking event (Obama gives a speech, a major natural disaster, election night, etc.), live coverage from CNN Live becomes available. Hell, this is a feature that I'd purchase as a standalone app itself.

iReport: Out of all of the CNN iPhone App's features, this one may be the most game-changing. iReport is CNN's user-generated citizen journalism initiative, where everyday citizens can upload photos, videos, and stories about events happening near them. Some of it is even used on CNN's news coverage.

Guess what? The app lets you submit photos and videos you take with your iPhone to iReport and to CNN. Can you imagine how much citizen journalism this app will encourage?

To say we're impressed with this app is an understatement. CNN went all-out with features and functionality, but did it in a way that's simple and easy to use and consume. The app sets a new standard in functionality and even has the potential to change the news game with its iReport integration. It's the complete package.

Tags: cnn, iphone, iphone app, News

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Early Android 2.0 "Donut" build available, up and running on G1 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Are we finally ready to embrace paying for APIs? It seems so, as long as the value is there for developers.

Spinvox announced they've signed up 600 developers in five months. The API (our Spinvox API profile) brings the power of voice transcription to an application.

And developers are apparently willing to pay for that power. Spinvox charges 35 cents to create text from a half-minute message.

Using a computer to convert speech to text has been long promised, but poorly executed over the years. Spinvox uses a combination of methods, including sometimes falling back on humans to do the work.

There is a real cost to the company to provide the service, but there's also an undeniable value to its output. Yet there are worries that Spinvox has grown too fast after a deal to serve Telefonica's 125 million customers in Latin America. The company may be paying staff with stock, which leaves questions for developers building a business on top of Spinvox.

This is all fuel to an argument for Spinvox charging for its service. If enough developers payand they seem to be open to itthe service should remain reliable. The same cannot always be said for those APIs without a clear revenue stream, as we've seen recently with Google's Mashup Editor and Microsoft's PopFly mashup tool.

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